An Amazing List of Magazines
Adrienne LaFrance (from The Atlantic) asked on Twitter: “What’s the first magazine you ever loved?” What follows is a long list of magazines—some still operating, some defunct—that is an amazing stroll down memory lane.
It reminded me that Mad magazine was my elementary school crush. I wanted a subscription so badly, but I felt awkward asking for it because I also had to have my sister explain a lot of the jokes in it. Our dentist had it at his office, and that was the pure joy of going to the dentist—time in the waiting room trying to fold in the back picture, creased by so many prior patients.
But my first true love, my first mature magazine relationship, was Sassy magazine. I started reading it with the first issue (purchased at People’s drug on the lower level of the mall), and I kept reading it long after I left the demographic. At some point, my mother made me cull my collection and only keep the most important articles. I still have them today.
That magazine was incredible. I wish girls today had Sassy. It was truly a life-changing, empowering, mind-expanding paper companion.
What was your first favourite magazine?
9 comments
Aside from Tiger Beat & 16?? lol (Those were definitely the first magazines that I remember loving.) It was probably Seventeen magazine. I read and was hugely influenced by Joyce Maynard’s memoir “Looking Back” when I was a young teenager… she wrote about her obsession with Seventeen magazine, and so I looked for it and started reading it too. I read it well into university, when I eventually traded it in for Glamour & Mademoiselle, but I remember it fondly. I read Teen magazine too, but Seventeen had more polish and sophistication, I thought. I kept stacks of back issues of both forever before I reluctantly threw them out. (Sassy was a little after my time…!)
As an aside, for those of us who read Tiger Beat in the late 1960s/early to mid-1970s, you should follow the former editor Ann Moses on Facebook. She wrote a memoir called “Meow!” in which she dishes about all the teen idols of the day (the Monkees, David Cassidy, the Osmonds…!), and she’s kept in touch with many of them over the years. So much fun!
I loved Sassy too! So. Much. I haven’t thought about it in years. I don’t read magazines now except when I’m waiting to get my hair cut (hahaha, remember when we used to get hair cuts in an actual salon and there were magazines??)
LOL Sassy!! NICE choice. I have a kid who would have said the same thing.
However, girls today still have access to New Moon Girls and in my opinion is superior because it’s written by girls, for girls and is ad-free.
Disclosure: I am doing some part time contract work for NMG and am a volunteer online community moderator for their companion community BUT I’m doing both of those because my girls had NMG when they were kids and I truly believe it is an awesome publication. 😉
OMG, my sister and I LOVED Sassy! We used to buy Tiger Beat just for the Duran Duran posters. 🙂
I remember subscribing to Seventeen magazine when I was 13 or 14 ad loving it. The lifestyle it depicted seemed very glamorous to someone growing up in a small town in a sparsely populated western state like me.
Confession time.
Mine was Readers Digest.
In my defense, I DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS AN OLD PERSON’S MAGAZINE AT THE TIME!
It was just bite-sized stories and funnies for 8 year old me.
The funny thing is, last Christmas, my mom got me a subscription. So now after many decades, I’m reading it again. Now as an actual old person, lol.
Ahhh I LOVED Mad Magazine!!!! we used to be able to buy it at the grocery store, and I may have had a subscription at one point.
In junior high I had a subscription to Games magazine.
I never read Sassy (I think I’m too old) but your mention of it immediately brought to mind that Phil Hartman sketch on SNL…
My sister used to get Tiger Beat.Shaun Cassidy crush, anyone else? 😂
Ha! Lori, I think Reader’s Digest is the only magazine I read fairly regularly. We never had any other subscriptions, aside from the newspaper, and I never bought the magazines unless there was a particular poster I really needed to have (which…I never really needed to have any). I preferred books to magazines, but we always had a Reader’s Digest laying around.
The first magazines I spent my hard-earned money (pocket money or summer jobs from the age of 11) were Pink and Jackie. They were both English magazines for teens – the only ones our town bookstore got in – and I bought both of them, depending on which issue was out and which singers were featured on the covers/in the posters. They took me to a more exciting world than my rural life, and I loved them.